# Twigs, leaves and overall forest improvements

**URL:** <https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487>\
**Category:** The Drawing Board\
**Created:** [January 8, 2022, 10:00am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487 "2022-01-08T10:00:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![NetSysFire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/97f17d/32.png) [@NetSysFire](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/NetSysFire)\
**Post date:** [January 8, 2022, 10:00am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487/1 "2022-01-08T10:00:19Z")

</div>

If you ever visited a forest in real life, the ground is mostly old leaves and little twigs. More like splinters but there are also many bigger twigs.

 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/cataclysmdda/original/2X/8/8dddbc8886c5736dc342928dd4770ebb18659b83.jpeg)  
(from: [File:Forest-floor076.jpg - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Forest-floor076.jpg))

Currently it is actually hard to find firewood without an axe in the forest. As someone who actually gathered firewood for an actual fire in the forest, it is actually pretty easy to find a bit of firewood for a small camp fire you use to cook food.

This is why I want to potentially add a new tile: Forest soil. You get some leaves, splinters and twigs from it. If you are lucky you might even find a stick. The reason why I do not want to spread all that as items on the forest floor is performance, so adding a new tile and letting the player either examine it or use some sort of construction action to gather stuff seems sensible.  
I think a construction action might be better here because if you can examine literally almost any tile in the forest it gets spammy.

Why leaves? There is the pile of leaves and a few constructions in my PR which need an insane amount of withered plants or straw because we do not have leaves yet. Both twigs and leaves are mostly intended to be burned, but can be used for some crude constructions if you have to live in the forest. I could imagine they can also be used for composting, but this is out of scope.

Leaves and twigs should also be dropped from trees when you cut them down. This should be the only thing requiring C++. I would also buff shrubs because they only give you 0-2 withered plants. They would drop leaves and a slightly higher amount of withered plants.

I am aware that in real life you have to fight against wet firewood, but this is also out of scope here, until we have support for wet terrain.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![spicyshadow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5e9695/32.png) [@spicyshadow](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/spicyshadow)\
**Post date:** [January 8, 2022, 3:11pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487/2 "2022-01-08T15:11:47Z")

</div>

A faster work around for constructions like a strawbed that need a lot of material is simply to add a longer constuction time and get rid of the withered plant/straw as construction material. This would represent your character going around and gathering the materials nessecery to make the bed without the player having to be bothered with extra keypresses and busywork. Just make sure that these types of construction can only be made on diggable terain to prevent people from being able to construct these anywhere.

I still like the forest soil idea. Some other things you might be able to find in forest soil would be tinder (material conbustable enough to be used as such) and rarely pieces of trash (people like to litter). Trash that you or I might ignore but that could be very usefull to a innawood survivorl

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kchalupa](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/kchalupa/32/6863_2.png) [@kchalupa](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/kchalupa)\
**Post date:** [January 17, 2022, 6:00pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487/3 "2022-01-17T18:00:22Z")

</div>

This would be good for crafting arrows more sustainably. Rather than cutting down trees to get a smallish amount of them. It also puts a heavy strain on the diet to do so. Character needs more calorie dense food.

To train the archery skill takes firing literally thousands of arrows. Is there a better way to train the skill. I saw a few books to train it, but they only go up to four or five.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kevin.granade](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/kevin.granade/32/1316_2.png) [@kevin.granade](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/kevin.granade)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2022, 8:19am UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487/4 "2022-01-18T08:19:30Z")

</div>

> [@NetSysFire](#):
>
> I am aware that in real life you have to fight against wet firewood, but this is also out of scope here, until we have support for wet terrain.

I would say you want to default to wet firewood until you have support for tracking whether terrain is wet.

Diggable isn’t a great match for “ready access to misc wood and leaf litter”, e.g. farm fields, desert, beach.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![NetSysFire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/97f17d/32.png) [@NetSysFire](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/NetSysFire)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2022, 2:30pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487/5 "2022-01-18T14:30:00Z")

</div>

To clarify, forest soil would be in forests only.

I might work on at least leaves in my current more foliage PR.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Invalid\_Username](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/4bbf92/32.png) [@Invalid\_Username](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/Invalid_Username)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2022, 12:52pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487/6 "2022-01-28T12:52:43Z")

</div>

> [@kchalupa](#):
>
> To train the archery skill takes firing literally thousands of arrows.

My latest character has gone from 0-5 Archery on basically a single quiverful of carbon-fiber arrows. Even taking into account that they are much more hardy than, say, wooden broadheads, “thousands of arrows” might be a bit of an exaggeration.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kchalupa](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.cataclysmdda.org/kchalupa/32/6863_2.png) [@kchalupa](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/u/kchalupa)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2022, 4:09pm UTC](https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/twigs-leaves-and-overall-forest-improvements/27487/8 "2022-01-28T16:09:23Z")

</div>

I’ll try that in the latest build.